My Taboo Harem!

Chapter 733: Luxury of Hope

Marcus watched her from the bed.

He did not offer her a dustpan, a cloth or direct attention one would give if one cared whether she cut her fingers on the sharper edges — which she did, twice, because he was watching her and she understood that the small quiet cost of letting him watch her bleed a little was part of the therapy of his own recovered composure.

She knelt on the cream carpet like a penitent before an altar that had long since stopped believing in gods. Each time the glass bit into her fingertips, a bead of pale gold welled up and Marcus’s eyes followed it with the lazy satisfaction.

She did not heal the cuts.

The small beads of her pale gold blood welled against her fingertips and she let them, because Marcus was looking, and because a part of his healing cycle was fed by the demonstration that his servant could bleed for him.

She gathered every shard.

Blotted the stain with a linen napkin from the tray, pressing carefully to avoid driving the wine deeper into the fibres.

She rose and carried the shards and the stained napkin before she returned with a small dish of warm water and a fresh linen cloth and knelt again and began to finish cleaning the stain.

Behind her, Marcus began to undress.

His ribs still protesting under the silk. He got his shirt off with some difficulty.

Then his trousers — which had been changed, since the morning’s humiliation, into the cream linen pyjamas and he let those drop too.

"Anahita."

"Yes, my lord."

"Get up here."

She set down the cloth. Rose. Went to the bedside.

Climbed onto the silk sheets beside him without being told how, because she had done this several hundred times over three years and the choreography was settled.

Marcus lay back against the pillows.

Closed his eyes.

"Start."

Anahita placed her palms, flat, against Marcus Heavenchild’s bare chest.

And she started healing him as soon as her palms sat flat to his chest, delivering the slow outflow of distilled Angel healing energy that his damaged body required. Her channel threaded open and warm gold light moved from her palms into his chest and radiated outward through his vessel.

His ribs began, slowly, to re-knit, the fine capillaries along his jaw began to close, the deep tissue bruising across his lumbar, invisible beneath the pyjama waistband, began to pale.

This was the part that would have been sufficient.

It was not; however, the part Marcus chose.

His right hand rose — slowly, without urgency — and settled on the back of her neck beneath the silver curtain of her hair. Not gripping, just resting.

A proprietor’s hand on his property.

"Keep going."

"Yes, my lord."

His thumb began a slow lazy stroke along the hairline at the base of her skull like he owns and wished to remind her, without ceremony, of the ownership.

Anahita’s palms did not falter on his chest.

The healing continued.

"Your cheek is still warm."

His voice was quiet. Almost tender.

"Where I slapped you earlier."

"Yes, my lord."

"Does it hurt."

"A little, my lord."

"Good."

The thumb continued its lazy stroke.

Anahita’s smile — it was stupid of her to expect him to feel remorseful even for once after these all years — but she remained precisely composed not betraying anything.

Marcus’s hand slid down.

From her neck to her collarbone, beneath the white shift dress, to the slope of her left breast.

"Continue the healing."

"Yes, my lord."

She continued.

His hand remained where it was.

After a while — perhaps three minutes, perhaps five — he began, idly, to toy with her nipple beneath the fabric. Without interest. Without heat, just an absent-minded fidgeting — his hand occupied because he had decided to occupy it, because the occupying of it demonstrated something to both of them about the shape of their relationship.

Anahita did not respond or reach up to remove his hand no matter how sick it made her feel.

Anahita did not dare indicate, by any micro-expression, that she it made her sick to the point of wishing to cut his hand off right here!

Her palms continued to deliver the healing.

The smile continued to hold.

After a few minutes, Marcus was mostly repaired.

The deepest bruises were gone; his ribs had finished their structural knitting and the capillaries were clean.

Marcus exhaled in a long satisfied sigh.

His hand slid out from beneath the shift dress and settled back on the pillow beside his head.

"Good girl."

Anahita’s palms lifted from his chest.

She sat back on her heels beside him on the silk sheets, small and composed, her shift dress slightly disarrayed along the left side from where his hand had been, her silver hair falling forward across her shoulder.

"Water, my lord?"

"In a minute."

His pale eyes had begun to close again. The post-healing lassitude always pulled him toward a long heavy nap, and he did not resist it.

"Anahita."

"Yes, my lord."

"Have I made you happy in your service here."

The question was, in Marcus’s head, almost tender. A moment of patrician concern for the wellbeing of the treasured asset beside him.

He did not understand it to be cruel or hear it as cruel. He had never, in years of asking her variations of this question, heard it as anything but a considerate master’s attentive inquiry.

Anahita lowered her head in the precise gesture her training permitted for this specific question.

"Yes, my lord. I am honoured by my service to you."

"Good girl."

He drifted toward sleep.

Anahita sat beside him on the silk for another five minutes, until she confirmed he was fully asleep. Then she rose too straightened her shift before she smoothed her hair.

She drew the velvet drapes a fraction tighter against the late afternoon light.

Then she stepped back.

Bowed once to the sleeping Heavenchild heir.

And returned, silent, to the adjoining room.

She sat in the hotel armchair she had not, until now, sat in.

Not because she was tired, she did not tire in this projection, but because — for the next forty minutes, until Marcus’s nap required her to re-emerge and begin the evening cycle — she had no duties. No summons. No tasks. No eyes upon her.

Forty minutes of being, privately, nothing to anyone.

She lowered herself into the chair like a ghost returning to its favourite haunt.

The silk of her shift whispered against the fabric and for one stolen breath she let her shoulders drop — really drop — the way no one in three centuries had ever seen her do.

The weight of every hand that had ever rested on her without asking, every order given without looking at her face, every "good girl" spoken like a coin tossed to a well-trained animal, settled across her bones at once.

She closed her own eyes.

The small, serene smile she had worn for the entire afternoon, the smile that had held through the slap and the glass and the thumb at the hairline and the hand beneath the shift dress and the good girl at the end of it — that smile dropped.

Her face, in the quiet of the armchair, with no one to see, became briefly and entirely blank.

Empty as a room after the last guest has left. No performance or audience.

Just the vast, quiet nothing she had learned to visit like a secret grave.

For these forty minutes, she permitted herself the mercy of being no one’s anything.

Then — because she had learned, over a length of time no mortal could properly measure, that even private blankness was a small luxury she permitted herself sparingly, lest it grow into something she could not afford —

She composed the smile again.

And sat.

And waited.

Somewhere, far from the adjoining room and the Heavenchild suite and the private healing she would re-enter in forty minutes, a seventeen-year-old Cosmic Dragon was eating a second breakfast in the Empyrean Dining Hall and laughing at a friend who had filmed a prince pissing himself.

Anahita had been told to seduce him... that mission had been issued abstractly. In principle.

But she understood, with the quiet certainty she brought to all her compiled intelligence, that the instructions to actually approach the Cosmic Dragon’s bed would arrive within days.

And that — when they arrived — the small serene smile she had practiced for millennia would meet a man who would look directly at her for the first time in a very long time.

And see her.

She did not let the thought grow roots.

She had seen too many men look at her and see only what they could take.

Yet something small and dangerous flickered behind her ribs anyway — the terrifying possibility that this one might actually see the woman behind the centuries of polished nothing. She crushed it before it could become hope.

Hope was a luxury even more expensive than tears.

She composed the smile, and she sat, and she waited.